The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Big Balls of…

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-04-24

The dependency graph of your application can provide a lot of insight into how objects call each other. In a well designed application, this is probably mostly acyclic and no one node on the graph has more than a handful of edges coming off of it. The kinds of applications we talk about here, on the other hand, we have a name for their graphs: the Enterprise Dependency and the Big Ball of Yarn.

Thomas K introduces us to an entirely new iteration: The Big Ball of Mandelbrot

26 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-24

The Truth About Comparisons

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-04-23

We often point to dates as one of the example data types which is so complicated that most developers can’t understand them. This is unfair, as pretty much every data type has weird quirks and edge cases which make for unexpected behaviors. Floating point rounding, integer overflows and underflows, various types of string representation…

But file-not-founds excepted, people have to understand Booleans, right?

36 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-24

Placeholders-a-Plenty

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-04-20

"On my admittedly old and cheap phone, Google Maps seems to have confused the definition of the word 'trip'," writes Ivan.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-23

A Problematic Place

by Josh Cox in CodeSOD on 2018-04-19

In programming, sometimes the ordering of your data matters. And sometimes the ordering doesn’t matter and it can be completely random. And sometimes… well, El Dorko found a case where it apparently matters that it doesn’t matter:

DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(directory);
FileInfo[] files = di.GetFiles();
DirectoryInfo[] subdirs = di.GetDirectories();

// shuffle subdirs to avoid problematic places
Random rnd = new Random();
for( int i = subdirs.Length - 1; i > 0; i-- )
{
    int n = rnd.Next( i + 1 );
    DirectoryInfo tmp = subdirs[i];
    subdirs[i] = subdirs[n];
    subdirs[n] = tmp;
}

foreach (DirectoryInfo dir in subdirs)
{
   // process files in directory
}

45 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-23

The Proprietary Format

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-04-18

Have you ever secured something with a lock? The intent is that at some point in the future, you'll use the requisite key to regain access to it. Of course, the underlying assumption is that you actually have the key. How do you open a lock once you've lost the key? That's when you need to get creative. Lock picks. Bolt cutters. Blow torch. GAU-8...

In 2004, Ben S. went on a solo bicycle tour, and for reasons of weight, his only computer was a Handspring Visor Deluxe PDA running Palm OS. He had an external, folding keyboard that he would use to type his notes from each day of the trip. To keep these notes organized by day, he stored them in the Datebook (calendar) app as all-day events. The PDA would sync with a desktop computer using a Handspring-branded fork of the Palm Desktop software. The whole Datebook could then be exported as a text file from there. As such, Ben figured his notes were safe. After the trip ended, he bought a Windows PC that he had until 2010, but he never quite got around to exporting the text file. After he switched to using a Mac, he copied the files to the Mac and gave away the PC.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-24

Breaking Changes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-17

We talk a lot about the sort of wheels one shouldn’t reinvent. Loads of bad code stumbles down that path. Today, Mary sends us some code from their home-grown unit testing framework.

Mary doesn’t have much to say about whatever case of Not Invented Here Syndrome brought things to this point. It’s especially notable that this is Python, which comes, out of the box, with a perfectly serviceable unittest module built in. Apparently not serviceable enough for their team, however, as Burt, the Lead Developer, wrote his own.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-18

All the Things!

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-16

Yasmin needed to fetch some data from a database for a report. Specifically, she needed to get all the order data. All of it. No matter how much there was.

The required query might be long running, but it wouldn’t be complicated. By policy, every query needed to be implemented as a stored procedure. Yasmin, being a smart prograammer, decided to check and see if anybody had already implemented a stored procedure which did what she needed. She found one called GetAllOrders. Perfect! She tested it in her report.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-19

Surgeons, Put Down Your Scalpels

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-04-13

"I wonder what events, or lawsuits, lead TP-Link to add this warning presumably targeted individuals who updated firmware just ahead of performing medical procedures," writes Andrew.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-17

To Suffer The Slings and Arrows of Vendor Products…

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-04-12

Being a software architect is a difficult task. Part of the skill is rote software design based upon the technology of choice. Part of it is the very soft "science" of knowing how much to design to make the software somewhat extensible without going so far as to design/build something that is overkill. An extreme version of this would be the inner platform effect.

Way back when I was a somewhat new developer, I was tasked with adding a fairly large feature that required the addition of a database to our otherwise database-less application. I went to our in-team architect, described the problem, and asked him to request a modest database for us. At the time, Sybase was the in-house tool. He decreed that "Sybase sucks", and that he could build a better database solution himself. He would even make it more functional than Sybase.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-19

Make Your Apps Faster With Raygun APM

by Scot Devera in Sponsor Post on 2018-04-11

Your software is terrible, but that doesn’t make it special. All software is terrible, and yes, you know this is true. No matter how good you think it is, bugs and performance problems are inevitable.

But it’s not just the ugly internals and mysterious hacks and the code equivalent of duct-tape and chewing gum which make your software terrible. Your software exists to fill some need for your users, and how do you know that’s happening? And worse, when your application fails, how do you understand what happened?

13 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-24

A Comment on the Military Industrial Complex

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-04-11

Simon T tugged at his collar when the video played. It wasn’t much, just a video of their software being tested. It wasn’t the first time they’d tested Simon’s most recent patch, but it was going to be the last time. There were a lot of eyes in the conference room, and they were all turned on him.

Simon worked for the kind of company which made missiles. The test in the video was one of the highly expensive tests of a real missile under real-world conditions. Several of these had already been done with this software package, so Simon hadn’t expected any problems to crop up. In this case, though, the missile left its launcher and sailed in a perfect parabolic arc into the ground 5 meters away from the launch site.

57 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-20

Without Context

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-10

When writing up a Code SOD, a big part of the goal is to provide context for the bad code. Why is it bad, what would be better,, etc. In other words, we need to… ShowContext. Vasco O has exactly the method for that.

protected string ShowContext(string context)
{
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(context))
    {
        return string.Format("{0}", context);
    }
    else
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }
}

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-11

Another Bitmask Fail

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2018-04-09

As we've seen previously, not all government jobs are splashy. Someone has to maintain, for example, the database that keeps track of every legal additive to food so that paranoid hippies can call them liars and insist they all cause cancer and autism. Today's submitter, Cass, had just released an update when users started getting the dreaded blue Internal Error screen—never a good start to the week.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-17

Heed this Warning

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-04-06

Sam B. writes, "Only £11.99 for a call_user_func_array() warning? What a bargain!"

40 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-12

Works for Us

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-04-05

Containers make deployment easy, or at least that’s what it says on the label. It makes intuitive sense, though- instead of wrangling all your dependencies on a host OS, and then trying to understand why your app can’t see them, you bundle all the dependencies into a container and push that around when you want to deploy. It Just Works™.

Sandra had just left a company which didn’t use containers, but containers wouldn’t have helped: the didn’t have a working deployment process, period. They didn’t even try deploying before the production push 9 months into the project, and the first twelve attempts consistently failed because someone hadn’t tested something, or someone didn’t update the script, or the requirements changed and were signed off but nobody told the development team. It meant a lot of nights, a lot of weekends, and a lot of meetings which devolved into circular firing squads.

Three gears which couldn't possibly turn

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-09

30 Days

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-04

Tim B did a little work with an e-learning vendor, with some very old code. The code in question happened to be so old that “this is server side JavaScript” was a horrifying novelty when they wrote it, instead of a standard deployment option via Node.

The code in question is bad date handling code, which isn’t impressive. What is impressive is that it demonstrates a terrible approach to dates which I’ve never seen before. It doubles as a terrible approach to arrays which I have seen before, but… it remains special.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-10

A Repeated Save

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-04-03

Ian S was going through the portfolio of applications maintained by his company, and stumbled across one that… well, from what he could tell, wasn’t written by a developer so much as spawned by an accident. 90% of the code was copy-pasted from somewhere else in the code, flow-of-control mostly used Exceptions as an attempt at doing GOTO-style logic, and there were piles of unused variables or variables used before initialization. Some modules/packages in the application were full of syntax errors, which implied that they weren’t actually included or used anywhere.

From that mess, Ian extracted this.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-03

AI-Driven Articles

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-04-02

If you've looked at job postings, you know that there's one thing really big and trendy right now, and that's blockchains. But the other trendy thing is Machine Learning! We'll talk about the Daily WTF's Initial Coin Offering at a later date, but for right now, we're excited to announce our new ML efforts.

Specifically, we recognize that there's a certain structure and pattern to our articles, and instead of paying human writers, we can instead employ the latest machine learning systems to generate new articles that will be indistinguishable from the articles you know and love. The ideal tool, of course, would be an Recurrent Neural Network, which we could train based off previous articles. Unfortunately, that involves a lot of GPU power, and we're already using our GPUs to get ready for that ICO I mentioned. Shhhh. It's a secret.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-17

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